The Watchers (28 page)

It is likely that Parry's high spirits came about from his meeting in Lyons with William Crichton, a Scottish Jesuit priest close to the Duke of Guise and involved in Guise's various plans for the invasion of Scotland and England. With Crichton, Parry discussed the lawfulness of killing a tyrant. Crichton, said that such an assassination was not legitimate, citing Saint Paul in the New Testament (Romans 3:8): ‘Evil is not to be done that good may ensue.' Parry disagreed: ‘it was not evil to take away so great an evil'. Yet in spite of their theological differences, Crichton became Parry's new contact with the authorities in Rome. By late May Parry had received, thanks to Cardinal Campeggio, a safe-conduct to travel through the Papal States. It was no wonder that in the middle of June, still in Lyons, Parry wrote to Walsingham: ‘the miscarrying of my letters to you may cost me my life'.

Parry never went to Rome. He travelled instead from Lyons to Paris, where at some time between October and December 1583 he visited Thomas Morgan, Mary Stuart's chief gatherer of secret intelligence. Their conversation changed Parry's life and committed him to a desperate course of action. Morgan took him into a private chamber. Parry later described the meeting. Morgan, he said, ‘told me that
it was hoped and looked for, that I should do some service for God and his Church. I answered him I would do it, if it were to kill the greatest subject in England: whom I named, and in truth then hated.' ‘No, no,' Morgan had said, ‘let him live to his greater fall and ruin of his house.' Parry was talking about the assassination of his own patron, Lord Burghley. But, Parry claimed, Morgan in fact meant Queen Elizabeth. Parry's reply was that so great a mission could be accomplished, if of course the theological case for the queen's murder was clear: ‘it were soon done, if it might [be] lawfully done, and warranted in the opinion of some learned divines'. Parry's theologian of choice was William Allen, whose
Modest Defence
had so influenced his thinking on the legitimacy of killing monarchs. But in fact it was a much humbler English priest, one Master Wattes, who, as William Crichton had done in Lyons, said plainly that it would be unlawful for Parry to assassinate the queen. Nevertheless Parry, persuaded by the arguments of Allen's
Modest Defence
, told Morgan that he would kill Elizabeth – so long as the Pope allowed him to do so and in turn granted full remission of Parry's sins.

Parry was able to convince Thomas Morgan and the Jesuits of his loyalty to their cause. He believed his reputation in Paris to be sound. But he still worried about secret enemies. For a night-time meeting with the Pope's nuncio, Parry was heavily wrapped in a cloak for disguise. At the end of November Parry wrote to the Cardinal of Como: ‘There are never wanting jealous and spiteful people unacquainted with my actions who will seek to malign me and give information against me to His Holiness and your eminence.' He asked Como to trust only the reports of the Archbishop of Glasgow and the Bishop of Ross (both ambassadors of the Queen of Scots), William Crichton, Charles Paget and Thomas Morgan. Parry sent another letter to the cardinal a few weeks later in which he enclosed an attestation by a Jesuit priest that in Paris he had confessed and received the sacrament of holy communion.

Parry left Paris in the last few days of December 1583, arriving in England at the port of Rye in January. Thanks probably to Sir Edward Stafford's effusive praise (and probably also Burghley's influence) Parry had ‘audience at large' with Elizabeth. Playing the loyal subject and
agent provocateur
he ‘very privately discovered to Her Majesty'
the conspiracy he had engineered to kill her. In spite of his privileged access to Elizabeth, he was unable to convince her of the substance of the plot; she ‘took it doubtfully'. Parry was for the first time seriously worried that he had fatally incriminated himself. He left the queen's presence in fear.

So now Parry faced the problem of loyalty. He had convinced Morgan in Paris of his seriousness in the mission of killing Elizabeth. The Cardinal of Como believed him to be a loyal Catholic, in spite of repeated warnings of Parry's bad character. Could he be trusted? Charles Paget's sister thought not: in January 1584 she wrote to her brother to say that Parry was a spy, and that everything Charles said to Morgan, Morgan repeated to Parry. ‘I pray you, good brother Charles, have great care with whom you converse.' Her letter, intercepted by Elizabeth's government, never reached him. Indeed Paget was certainly in contact with Parry. In February, from London, Parry thanked Paget for his ‘friendly letters'. So long as Paget promised to burn Parry's letters, just as Parry destroyed Paget's, he would continue to write. At the foot of this letter Parry wrote ‘Burn'. Paget, in Paris, never received it: the packet was intercepted by Elizabeth's government.

Up to his neck in conspiracy, Parry was, as ever, troubled by money. He desperately needed Burghley's patronage. Temporarily he appeared to turn away from treason, writing to Morgan in Paris to renounce his mission. He urged Morgan to burn their correspondence. Still hoping for better luck at court, in March he went to Greenwich Palace to petition Burghley for the vacant mastership of St Katharine's hospital for poor sisters, near the Tower of London. But while at Greenwich Parry received a letter from the Cardinal of Como. The Pope, Como wrote to Parry, commended ‘the good disposition and resolution which you … hold towards the service and benefit [of the] public: wherein His Holiness doth exhort you to persevere'. Desperate about his future, this was just the warrant Parry had been looking for. Suddenly his doubts disappeared. He later confessed that he found in Como's letter ‘the enterprise commended, and allowed'. Parry believed he was absolved in the Pope's name of all his sins.

But Parry's mind never rested in one place for very long. At times he was determined never to kill the queen. ‘I feared to be tempted,' he
later said, adding with a familiar dramatic touch: ‘and therefore always when I came near her, I left my dagger at home.' He pondered Elizabeth's excellent qualities. But then he asked himself: ‘Why should I care for her? What hath she done for me? Have I not spent ten thousand marks since I knew her service, and never had penny by her?' True, she had given him his life when he had been pardoned of his conviction for the assault of Hugh Hare the moneylender. Still, he reflected, it would anyway have been tyranny to execute him.

In May, Parry was still hoping for Burghley's help in the mastership of St Katharine's, though Parry sent his great patron a letter the tone of which was peevish and resentful. He blamed his troubles on secret enemies. With no whisper of irony or self-doubt, he wrote of the strength of his loyalty in matters of religion and duty: quite a feat of psychological gymnastics for a man who in Paris had sworn to murder the queen. Parry was sure that Walsingham and Burghley could help him easily to secure the mastership of St Katharine's. He thought no other candidate was better suited: ‘I would to Christ Her Majesty would command any further trial of me.' ‘Remember me, my dearest lord,' he wrote, ‘and think it not enough for a man of my fortune past to live by meat and drink. Justice itself willeth it should be credit and reward.' Yet Parry's letter came to nothing, and his hopes were frustrated. At the foot of his letter to Burghley he wrote the word ‘Burn'. As usual, Burghley ignored him.

Two months later, in July, Parry read the signals correctly: he despaired of any success in promotion and preferment. He left Elizabeth's court, he later wrote, ‘utterly rejected, discontented, and as Her Majesty might perceive by my passionate letters, careless of myself'. He went back to London from Greenwich Palace to find that a copy of William Allen's
Modest Defence
had been sent to him from France. Did Thomas Morgan send it or Charles Paget? Whoever gave Parry a copy of the
Modest Defence
knew his man, for once again the despondent spy and commissioned assassin felt the persuasive power of Doctor Allen's arguments. The
Modest Defence
, Parry said, ‘redoubled my former conceits: every word in it was a warrant to a prepared mind: it taught that kings may be excommunicated, deprived, and violently handled: it proveth that all wars civil or foreign undertaken for religion, is [
sic
] honourable.'

By August 1584 Parry had regained some of his equanimity, though he was having to fight hard to convince Burghley of his loyalty. Burghley wondered instead whether Parry was quite the gentleman he claimed. Someone had cast doubt upon Parry's gentility, and Parry wanted to reassure Burghley, who was an obsessive genealogist with a keen nose for the lineage of gentlemen and noblemen, of his good name and reputation. From his lodgings in Fetter Lane near Holborn, Parry set out to defend himself.

Parry's short autobiography may suggest some of the reasons for his tangled and complicated life. He explained that his family had been long established in the county of Flintshire in north Wales. But where he had blood and ancestry, he lacked money. Parry set out his circumstances; their theme was a genteel and unfortunate poverty. He wrote that his father was a poor gentleman who had served in the king's guard. Parry was one of sixteen children by his mother (his father's second wife) and he had fourteen half brothers and sisters. His father had died early in Elizabeth's reign at the improbably fantastic age of 118 years, a father to thirty children with very little land of his own. Clearly William Parry had to compete against extraordinary domestic odds: probably the eager, often combative tone of his letters even to powerful men is not very surprising.

Parry had married twice for money, though not with great success. His second wife's income was £80 a year, four times his own. Unable to spend her money, he had to scratch a living from his own. He professed prudent domestic economy. Dice, cards, hawking and hunting, he said, had never cost him more than £20. He supported two of his nephews in their studies at Oxford and maintained four others, one of whom was in France, another in London, and two at a country school in Flintshire. For ten years he had helped a poor brother and his wife and their fifth son. He gave money weekly to twelve poor folks in the village in which he had been born. He also wrote pointedly of the cost of his ‘trouble and travail', by which he meant his work abroad for the queen. So he admitted to his generosity and to his poor management of money. He said nothing of his enormous debts or of his conviction for the assault of Hugh Hare the moneylender three years earlier. He threw himself upon Burghley's mercy. His own life, and the lives of those of his family whom he supported, rested on
Burghley. With unhappy urgency he wrote: ‘All this (my best lord) is as true as the Lord liveth. Help therefore I beseech you, or else you shall shortly see me and all these to fall at once. For truly they shall not lack while I have.' Burghley, predictably, was unmoved.

Though by late summer desperate for promotion and patronage and burdened by the strain of the mission he had undertaken on behalf of the Cardinal of Como, Parry was not a man to give up easily. For a long time he had believed that his interests lay with the powerful Cecil family. In Paris he had got to know Robert Cecil, Lord Burghley's son, and Burghley's grandson William Cecil. In August Robert, still in Paris, wrote to Parry with genuine affection. Parry grabbed his chance a month later, when Robert Cecil's cousin, Sir Edward Hoby, appointed Parry his solicitor at court. Hoby was twenty-four years old, schooled at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford – the very same young man Parry had tried to entangle in his dubious money-making scheme back in 1581, which had led to Parry's imprisonment in the Poultry Counter. Either Parry had not properly learned his lesson or, desperate for his chance to succeed, he carried on regardless. Parry now wrote of his work for Sir Edward with confident self-assurance: ‘I am fully acquainted with his state and daily occupied in settling such matters for him as may most import him in profit and credit.' He felt ‘most bound' to do all he could for Sir Edward. Young Hoby at least was convinced: he wrote to his uncle Burghley to extend to Master Doctor Parry the same credit he would give to his nephew. Parry was as ever the persistent petitioner. As he wrote to Burghley: ‘if it please you to commend me as a fit man for a deanery, provostship or mastership of requests it is all I crave'.

Yet in spite of his remarkable (even delusional) persistence the months of 1584 were miserable ones for William Parry. Returned at long last from his foreign travels and travails, he was settled in London. ‘I never liked country better, nor of all persons of quality received better usage,' Robert Cecil wrote to Parry from Paris. Doctor Parry's feelings in London were quite the opposite. He felt his was a cold homecoming. In May he perceived the sharp stab of failure; he was desperate for preferment; he was growing resentful that his great talents were being passed over; he discerned the slanders of secret enemies. Though he succeeded in earning the trust of an upcoming
and talented young gentleman of good connection like Sir Edward Hoby, Parry believed that the sacrifices made in the service of the queen had brought him no reward. He was able to make powerful friends, yet the great prizes of patronage continued to elude him. To Burghley and Walsingham he professed loyalty and service to Elizabeth. The truth, however, is that after August 1584 Parry was working out the most effective way to assassinate the queen.

Parry recruited a fellow conspirator. His name was Edmund Nevylle, a gentleman of good connections in the north who shared a surname with the earls of Westmorland. Parry claimed Nevylle as his cousin, though he later said that Nevylle was a sponger who often came to his house on Fetter Lane to ‘put his finger in my dish, his hand in my purse'. In the end Nevylle betrayed him. Parry noted sourly: ‘the night wherein he accused me, [he] was wrapped in my gown'.

The facts of what happened between August 1584 and January 1585, the critical months of the conspiracy, have to be teased out of a thicket of self-justifying obfuscations in the later statements of Parry and Nevylle. Their conspiracy began with a discussion of William Allen's
Modest Defence
. Certainly they took some time to arrive at a firm plan. First Parry visited Nevylle at the Whitefriars, and Nevylle returned the courtesy one morning to find Parry lying in bed in his lodgings on Fetter Lane. At dinner they spoke about Parry's disappointment over St Katharine's hospital. His only way of redress, Parry said, was to kill the queen. According to Allen's
Modest Defence
, which had captured Parry's imagination in a powerful and dangerous way, Parry believed that such an act was lawful. Nevylle, it seems, preferred to free the Queen of Scots from her English captivity. But in the end he came round to Parry's proposal for assassinating Elizabeth, and the next morning Nevylle came again to Parry's lodging. He swore on the Bible ‘to conceal and constantly to pursue the enterprise for the advancement of [the Catholic] religion'.